Posts in Digital Humanities
Introduction to Leaflet.js

This tutorial builds upon our teaching modules that explored Google My Maps and Google Earth. In it, I will introduce Leaflet.js—a javascript-based program for hosting maps on your website.

Leaflet.js is open source and provides quite a bit of functionality that goes beyond the basic features of Google Maps. And, for those who wish to host maps on their own websites, it’s a relatively simple and low-cost option.

In this tutorial, we walk through a series of steps to understand the basics of Leaflet.js. The tutorial provides an example of how to create a basic map using a georectified historical map from MapWarper and a kml layer that we create in Google My Maps.

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Digital Humanities in Promotion and Tenure

As more scholars have engaged in the digital humanities—and as this scholarship has become an increasingly prominent part of promotion and tenure cases—it has become incumbent upon professional organizations and university departments to educate faculty on 1) what we mean by digital humanities and 2) how to evaluate faculty research in the digital humanities.

This post is a brief introduction to the digital humanities (a.k.a. DH) for university faculty whose responsibilities include reviewing promotion and tenure cases.

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Digital Audio for Public Historians (4): Editing Your Audio

Today, I am going to work with you on some basic audio editing techniques. As you will remember from class, we could use any number of programs to edit, such as GarageBand or Audacity. Since we all have a free subscription to Adobe Audition, I am going to demonstrate with it.

While the techniques that I am showing you today look different in different programs, all audio editing programs have the functionality that I am demonstrating.

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Digital Audio for Public Historians (3): Microphone Types

We’ve finally gotten to microphones. A quality microphone might be the most important factor in creating a good recording rather than a bad recording. 

I have already talked about onboard microphones a bit in the first entry in this series on recording devices. That’s pretty much all I have to say about built-in mics. They’re fine for getting the job done—if content is more important than quality. 

For many public history applications, we would much prefer to have great content and a quality recording. To do this, we need good microphones that are set up so that they record what we want them to record and ignore what we want them to ignore. 

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Digital Audio for Public Historians (2): Mono and Stereo

In this second installment for “Digital Audio for Public Historians,” I want to have a look at one of the basic recording options available on mid-range recorders: the option to have a mono or stereo recording. We will use sample recordings from the 1960s to illustrate a few key principals, including recordings of James Baldwin, The Beach Boys, and The Beatles.

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Google Trends Data Shows Increasing Public Interest in the "Anthropocene"

There are numerous indicators that suggest increasing public interest in the Anthropocene—a concept that suggests humanity has transformed the earth to such an extent that we have entered a new biogeophysical age. In this interactive graph, I have pulled data from Google Trends, which shows quantitative evidence of growing interest in the Anthropocene.

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Aesthetic Categories in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Looking at Neoclassicism, the Renaissance, and the Gothic through Word Frequencies

One of my ongoing projects has been a historiography of the concepts of neoclassicism, the gothic, and the renaissance over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As part of this work, I ran some Google n-grams to chart the emergence of these categories. I don’t think that there is anything surprising in the data, but it’s nevertheless interesting to see it visualized. The first graph looks at the terms “Neoclassical,” “Renaissance,” “Gothic,” and “Arts and Crafts.” The second graph examines four different terms for speaking about the medieval world: “Medieval,” “Middle Ages,” “Gothic,” and “Dark Ages.”

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Early Modern Network Ontologies

Over the past two days (22-23 November 2014), I attended the Early Modern Network Ontologies Workshop in Pittsburgh.  The workshop, organized by Drew Armstrong, Alison Langmead, and Christopher Warren, focused on developing a prototype metadata structure for linked open data in projects involving historical research.

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